Profiles

Professor Martin Tomlinson

Emeritus Professor

Faculty of Science & Environment (NC)

Biography

Role

Provide academic leadership for research in the Security, Communications and Networking Research Centre. Carry out research into Communications Theory

Supervise Research Students

Qualifications

Professor Tomlinson is best known for the invention of the Tomlinson-Harashima pre-coding technique. He received his PhD from Loughborough University in 1970 on the subject of adaptive equalisation for data transmission and worked at Plessey Telecommunications Research Ltd until 1975 in the field of digital and satellite transmissions. He then spent seven years in the Satellite Communications Division of RSRE (now Qinetiq) where he worked on the Skynet ground and space segment. He was also project manager for the communications aspects of the NATO IV satellite before joining the University of Plymouth as the Head of the Communication Engineering Department in 1982. Professor Tomlinson is currently Head of Fixed and Mobile Research Centre and has published approximately 180 papers in the fields of Satellite Communications, Digital Modulation and Coding as well as contributing to various standards such as the DVB-RCS standard for small terminals. Professor Tomlinson is the holder of 28 patents and is a member of the IET, the IEEE, Information Theory Society, Communications Society (ComSoc) and a member of the IEEE Satellite and Space Communications Society.

Professional membership

MIET, Senior Member IEEE, Member SPIE

Teaching

Teaching interests

Multimedia communications

Satellite Communications

Wireless and mobile systemsCoding and Encryption

Signal and image processingData compression

Probabilistic computing

Research

Research interests

Digital communications

Error correcting codes

Error correcting decoders

Signal detection

Signal processingWatermarking

Wireless and mobile communicationsSatellite Communications

Probabilistic computing

CompressionEncryption

I have always been interested in the problems of eﬃcient communication of information in wireless and radio communications. Over the years this has developed into satellite communications, point to point communications, networked and broadcast (multicast) and a list of communication topics: Single user and multiple user communi­cations, multimedia communications and broadcasting. Small satellite terminal and mobile technology. Spread spectrum communications. Error correcting codes and near maximum likelihood decoding. Information theory, watermark­ing and data compression.

I am a rmember of the editorial board of IET Proceedings Communications and a reviewer for IET Proceedings -Vi­sion, Image and Signal Processing, and Electronics Letters, IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IEEE Commu­nications Letters, IEEE International Communications Conference (ICC), and IEEE International Symposium Information Theory (ISIT).

From time to time I carry out consultancy work for industry, via University of Plymouth, Research and Innovation, to organisations such as BAe, GCHQ, Met Oﬃce, ESA, BNSC, GE, AHA Comtech, and iCoding.

Other research

Involved in carrying out various communications research contracts for industry

Research groups

Centre for Security, Communications and Network Research (CSCAN)

Publications

RECENT JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS

[1] M. Tomlinson and C.J. Tjhai,

Analysis of the distribution of the number of erasures correctable by a binary linear code and the link to low weight codewords, IET Communications, Vol. 1, issue 3, pp.539-548, June 2007.

Advances in Iterative Decoding and Maximum Likelihood Decoding for the Packet Network with comparisons to Fountain Codes over the Erasure Channel, 4th International Symposium on Turbo Codes and Related Topics, Munich, April 2006.